I have lost my imaginary friend. She went out for a stroll and never came back. And other things have come to take her place.
Their paperwork was very official. They claimed themselves to be legitimate representatives of my imagination. We have on occasion been taxed with playing you in the early morning, they claimed. But in truth, these were things that wouldn’t play in the familiar ways upon the sprawling filaments of the universe my work station contains.
Sorts of things have hands where they should have eyes and have eyes everywhere in between. Crawling insufficiencies and elongations of the lower intestine. The underthings—and the overdrive gone into overdrive. And everything in between.
I have been put into quarantine here in my suburban Vietnamese home. I have been in contact with a person who was in contact with a person who was in contact with a person. I have a cat who lives in my yard, and this is not a healthy cat. Old women scale the walls of my garden to chop down bananas and shout at me across the many leafy plants.
So, I’ve become reflective.
Do you ever think about the private lives of mosquitoes or the delicate touch of maggots? I have leapt back from the kitchen trash at the touch of a gecko as it scurries up my forearm in an unnerving squiggle of its lizard belly, but—from a distance—the movements of geckos are like a dance that defies the eyes.
The songs of my younger days have evolved into a tapestry of hurts that I touch down on every night while I heat the water for my evening soak. I am studying five languages to prepare for what there is no preparing for. I have a nagging cough.
Because we’re walking on eggshells here. We’re walking on the fetuses of the future. We are stepping in the yolks of our children. Do you see their teeth protruding out of the ground?
Our silences account for everything. They are the parts of us that are. The stray cat in my garden—with her rust-colored tears and patches of faded black and brown on her otherwise white head—who is always coming closer but will never be within reach—who claims my roof as her home and sometimes goes to war with other cats outside my window—this is the person in my life now. There are days when the sound of the rain is like an army of hands flapping against the corrugated iron roof.
And what’s the answer to the ghost hands of the future? Are you half tied to the cards? Are the cards in your hand?
Answer. There’s nothing for us to do but dive into the broken glass. Let go of everything you thought you wanted. Destroy everything you believed was your home. Tomorrow is here, my darlings, and it is time for us to get out of bed—and step into the inferno.
I have had the occasional flash of insight. There have been moments when the fungal uncertainties of my throat become a maze of impossible vocal cords—which—these days, I mostly use to make coughing sounds—have been moments—when the songs of the world beyond these walls have become like a steady mumble of the undead, and the skies are forever waiting with open arms to embrace these strangers against a blanketing of stars—moments when the tiny unripe mangoes I am living off of in quarantine, more like meatier, creamier lemons than mangoes—that seem to contain worm upon worm like a Russian doll of invertebrate philosophers—and I am always stumbling upon the ants that form mystical highways from the tubing of the water heater along one wall of the bathroom and around and out through the concrete of the laundry room.
These are moments when my words are like a hand moving through me, for I have had points in my life when I believed my toes were not quite touching the ground—while I worked at a fish processing plant in the Bering Strait, for example. There have been afternoons when the only sound came from the alley—someone shouting to someone else, and they could have been calling for me. I have bit through the snifter. I am this mess you see before you.
But in the end, the flashes of insight were only a sickness from above. And one day, I stepped out onto the tile, looked past the padlocked front gate and at that same alley beyond and realized that I will never let go of the memory of my many lost loves. They are cursed by my on-going affection and occasional notes of concern.
I dream always of motoring my motorbike westward to the city of Chiang Mai and on to Northern India, and my neighbors here in suburban Vietnam can on occasions be very helpful, while at other times they are trying their damnedest not to throw me dirty looks as they amble past in close confidence with another man. In the warren of alleys surrounding my little house, the elderly sit on stools and chatter in a kind of discomfort of secrecy as they examine my front gate from a distance. Or approach the front of my house while shouting, Anh ơi! Anh ơi, and accompanied by a man in uniform who are indeed looking for official papers I do not have. These are also things that have happened.
As I am always giving the same advice as I forever pluck the shards of glass out of my lips. Because you always think you got a handle on things, but for some reason a fellow can’t stop biting through snifters in his glee at downing some quality amber. The sitcoms change, but the viewer remains the same.
You maneuver through doorways that just popped into existence a moment ago to make it into rooms that are largely theoretical—as the sky above grumbles with rain, and the sounds of yesteryear are pouring through your ears—because our worlds do overlap occasionally. We can on occasion share imaginary friends. There are times when my fantasies bump into your fantasies at their annual fantastical office party. Am I making you uncomfortable? It is my intention to make you uncomfortable.
Because no one likes to think of the boundaries of their mind as being fungible, but this is what I’m claiming—that my house has many holes, and your house does too, and sometimes holes are just an unusual way to understand fingers, and sometimes fingers are nothing but holes. Am I suggesting psychics be taken seriously? Am I seriously becoming psychotic in my suburban retreat?
Forget semantics. Look at yourself looking instead. You will find corners are not what you make of them, and often can obscure doors into doors and out of and through doors. Point being, the places where you end are only the places where you haven’t concocted a passageway yet. You can always get bigger, and the bigger you get, the more we overlap. And being uncomfortable is part of that.
So. Yes. There are times when you are me and I am you, and this may be one of those times. Let’s wander through the world as it falls apart, because this may be your last chance to step out of the end times before they eat you alive. I’ll give you a head start.
But. No. I kid.
Truth is I promised myself when my marriage fell apart that I would make a real try at losing myself in a series of dainty bottles, but I can’t seem to commit to it. I’ve barely begun to drown in a sea of alcohol, and I’m already feeling so over it. Which in part may have to do with the cough I believe is due to some sort of black mold and in no way has anything to do with coronavirus even when I am quarantining for coronavirus. My only symptom is a hacking cough that seems to come from the lung. For some reason, I have no doubt that I will live through this modern plague, if for no other reason than to see what the sequel looks like.
Point being, you got a knife protruding from your chest.
I am not here to pluck it out for you. I couldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. Literally. Of course, there are other places where people meet other people, like I said, and these days most of those places may seem to be largely a figment of your imagination, but maybe they always were?
But you should be watching for what’s coming. It may surprise you. I am sure it will. I’m already weeping over how brilliantly it will rewrite history.
Cyberpunk? A new Dark Ages? Star Trek utopia? How about all three at once depending on your pay grade. Let’s start with goodbye America and move on to hello to the genocides of yesteryear. They’re already making their debuts in the wild West of the America of tomorrow, aka PRC China.
But of course, I once called China my second home, and I am still a little bit too familiar with its many second tier and third tier cities. I have lived in almost as many places in China as in America—which is no small number—turned sixteen in a songbird cafe in Hong Kong while surrounded by elderly administrators from the colleges of the Midwest and South of my home country and went on my first date with a woman six years older than me in Shenzhen as we traipsed through miniatures of the world’s landmarks—but now that period of my life seems like a dream, just as this life would seem an impossible dream if I were to have told it to my younger self. Everything that is not now is always dreaming, but you knew that already.
The years I spent in China were good years, and the people I met were good people, but now it’s like being locked out of your own head because every time I think of China, I think of people in cages. Which… Yes, the good old U S of A has been known to separate children from their parents and confine them behind unspooled chainlink fence, which could, theoretically be dubbed as “caging” them, but… Semantics…
And yes, we can all agree that it’s a burden living with civilization’s death sentence always hanging over our heads when we just want to build a future, but that’s just the point. There’s no more future to build. All we have left is the present, so why are you playing last year’s game? How about we go high stepping into the high grass and see what other forms of play are to be found there?
But maybe you think me disingenuous when I’m the biggest loser of us all is the point. And I want you to join me down here in the muck is all.
So, I reach out. For what, I don’t know, but something.
I reach out with the clammy hands of the inconsolable rack and reach out there to what spaces I have seen round the periphery of the doorframe—a flickering that’s also a kind of itching at the back of the optic nerve. A ghost hand upon the wiring of the eye.
We have got to make our steps, whether the floor follows suit or not, and so—I’ve got the deranged look of the half-splattered and fingers that don’t quite fit in the sleeving of the internet. Got a toothy look while I hide behind the drawn metal gate of the front of my house. Got a study full of the decals of ancient times. The stray cat is always watching me.
This is not a place that is. This is a place that breathes.
Vĩnh Yên, Vietnam, 2021
Gabriel Boyer has been making up stories about himself for as long as he can remember. There was never a time he was not fully seated in his various delusions. He continues to delude himself daily. His latest release can be found below. You can read more about him here.
